rrdaniel2

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I am looking forward to taking part in the “open learning” cMOOC, mediated in part through http://openlearninghub.net/. It has been 2 years since my first participation in this project, in its 2017 iteration. (And, quite frankly, at that time, I was obligated to drop out about halfway through the semester-long process.)

It is a shorter and more intense iteration this time. I’m bringing different strengths and weaknesses to it this time around. But I’m hopeful that I’ll be a better and more productive participation this time.

One of the outcomes of that first, abortive, participation is that as a teacher and a scholar, I continue to think, almost continually, about “open”; I reflect on the many facets and dimensions that it implies. As part of my ongoing intellectual development, I will be more critical of openness, not in a counterproductive way, but by challenging and questioning some of the parameters, some of the promises and the, for lack of a better word, the closed-ness of openness. I come to the conversation a bit better armed with questions and with theoretical framings, with concrete and specific projects. My part in the conversation and what I will get out of it are likely to be richer, more conflicted and more nuanced than what my superficial and enthusiastic participation generated in January and February 2017.

So… I’m ready to go. Sort of. I’ll do my best to stay open-minded, even as I pose difficult questions, push back, present high levels of expectation relative to the general notion of openness.

So let me start right now with a few questions. What do we mean by “open”? It sounds great, suggesting open-mindedness, the opening of doors, the opening up of opportunities. But is open education all of those things? Is open access a real thing? Is open scholarship truly as free, as transparent, and as productive as the “open” label would seem to suggest? And, finally, and I’m not asking this only to be a hard-nosed contrarian, is open faculty development truly possible, truly sustainable, truly worthwhile? I think that the answer to those questions, if “yes,” must be a qualified affirmative at best.

Open education would seem to imply that the educational processes, the potential for learning, and the associated educational benefits can belong to anyone who is willing to take part and to work hard. Unfortunately, we know that that is not quite true. First, because of the digital divide, many folks cannot truly take part in these conversations, exchanges and other learning processes. Beyond that, not everyone is prepared for “open learning.” There are many whose digital literacy or whose literacy full stop is grossly inadequate. Those of us who are taking part in #openlearning19 are, I am certain, part of the “happy few.” We are a privileged, highly resourced, Western (mostly), and an intellectual élite attuned to a certain way of thinking about things. The ostensibly “open door of opportunity for learning” is not even visible to certain folks whose intelligence, whose native curiosity, and whose personal work ethic might otherwise make them good candidates for a learning experience along these lines.

Granted, this is a faculty development opportunity intended largely for folks associated with VCU and other institutions. But if it’s called “open” doesn’t that mean that it ought to be open to anyone and everyone? (To answer my own question: No, open does not necessarily mean open to everyone in the universe. That would be impossible! What a silly question.) So… coming to a synthesis with myself, I must ask just how “open” “open learning” happens to be? Obviously, no one who enrolls properly will be turned away or rejected. So in one sense, it’s completely open. But is it really? And when we talk about “open” whatever, shouldn’t we be worrying about this issue? Just how open are we? What are we doing to ensure that the underprivileged and the underserved of this world also have the opportunity to take part in such opportunities? Just how widely and welcomingly are we opening the door of learning opportunity?

(I might note that this is a question that I have posed regarding xMOOCs and the hype about access and offering “free” high-quality learning experiences to the globally underserved, which was part of the rhetoric used by Stanford, UPenn, Harvard and MIT in 2012 and afterward.)

Again, my tough questions are not intended to shut down conversation or to discourage anyone, but to pique the conscience of all and to get us to engage in a real conversation about the openness of openness. Is not saying no to anyone who knocks at the door sufficient to call an effort “open” in the broadest and best sense of that word?

I’ll ask a few other questions in coming days, but this first round of interrogation is confined the the question that I consider the most important one to ask of “open.” To wit: is it, in fact, truly, radically, sincerely, world-changingly “open”?

After spending many months away from blogging during a period of many demands on my time, I return. (The long silence was because I made my reentry into teaching and shared governance meetings after a year-long sabbatical; I had a self-imposed obligation to co-edit a volume that turned out to be more problematic, more time-consuming, and more rewarding than anticipated; I also was overcommitted to conference participation and collaborative projects; I was involved in new course development. And more.)

This blog entry will address a project that I expect to pursue in the near future, perhaps in collaboration with my spouse. It is an OER site that will have two or three distinct functions. In essence, it will demonstrate the use of French television news for helping students develop language skills, critical thinking and increasing their intercultural understanding. Of course, the site will present open and free materials and modules that teachers of French can download and adapt for their own use. However, the site will also include demonstrations, guidelines and advice for those teachers, suggesting ways in which they might adapt the materials that we present as open and free resources, but also ways in which they might begin to develop their own activities, modules and materials based on readily available streams of news media.

In short, we would offer ready-to-use materials (OERs), but we would also seek to help teachers use our instructional strategies and develop their own news-media-based lessons and activities (teacher-training OERs). It might make sense to split our project into two parts, setting up one site for making news-based lessons and modules readily available, and a distinct site devoted to professional development, training teachers to create such materials and employ the instructional strategies that we have been using in our own courses. Indeed, there might even be room for a third site with a more theoretical and research-oriented focus.

Why am I only “considering” the project, rather than simply doing it? Why am I talking about it here, rather than actually implementing it elsewhere on the web? In part, it is because it the project is complicated and we are not sure how much time we can afford to invest. There are decisions to make that we do not feel fully capable of managing properly. We have not yet figured out the best way to arrange things or to present the material that we would like to make available.

At this point, I believe my spouse is going to work with folks at her own university to format and upload materials to someone else’s OER site. She will then invite teachers and higher education faculty in French to view and use the materials, then ask for feedback. That will give her a sense for how to proceed.

In my case, I expect to begin building the teacher-training site that will offer theoretical frameworks and other resources for helping teachers understand the implications and potential advantages and pitfalls to using the television-news-based approach to language learning. The site would also display demonstrations of the method and suggest ways in which the strategy might be adapted to a wider variety of levels and institutional circumstances.

Finally, let me point our why, in our pedagogical area, we believe that using television news to teach students at the intermediate, intermediate-high and advanced levels in a second language (in this case, French) is a good idea. First, television news reports are authentic documents, intended for consumption by native speakers, not by language students. Authentic documents are very helpful for making progress in understanding and using authentic, native-level language. Secondly, by inviting students to note those aspects of news reports or the reporting/editing/presentation conventions that surprise them, one can help students become more aware of particular cultural differences. By reflecting on those differences, students can develop better understandings of target-culture attitudes and thinking modalities. One can focus also on differences in news conventions and engage in reflection on their significance. Third, many news reports directly provide cultural information. Fourth, news videos can provide a variety of accents, expressions and ways of talking about real events. Fifth, the news helps students establish connections to real-world events and to understand the contemporary French-speaking world.

For this approach to work well, the new reports must be chosen well. For that reason, it is important to train teachers in how to discern the most appropriate and potentially productive streams of information and specific reports. Additionally, it is helpful to gives teachers a set of tools and strategies for transforming exposure to a news video into a meaningful experience for language learners. That is why we believe that it would be most helpful not only to provide Open Educational Resources in the form of well-chosen news videos and lessons or modules based on them, but also to help teachers discern for themselves those issues which arise when trying to capture and present to students portions of the news stream. Hence, the need for a second site that focuses on professional development around this instructional strategy.

It is a not uncomplicated project that we have been considering. But I think that, at this juncture, we need to take the next step. My spouse will figure how to present specific lessons, modules and materials. I will begin creating a site, keyed to her OER contributions, that will explain how the approach works and why it is worth pursuing.

We have our work cut out of us in the days and weeks to come. We are going to take the next step, partly to toot our own horns. (After all, we have been using television news quite successfully in the French language classroom for over a decade. Why not show off our approach and get some credit for it?) However, we are also doing it because we believe that this approach can be extremely helpful for developing critical thinking, cross-cultural understanding, intercultural communicative competence and global citizenship skills and predispositions. The world needs better, more open-minded, more “inter-culturally skilled” global citizens. Our project to create OER sites will be a modest contribution for moving toward those goals.

…Yet, it’s neither easy, nor free-flowing nor natural. At least it does not seem so to me as I try to “open” my course development and scholarly work. I know that others have discussed the challenges, but I intend to walk through this on my own two feet (figuratively speaking) and lay things out as I see them from my naïve perspective.

There are two fundamental problems from which a plethora of smaller practical obstacles derive. The first is what I’ll just call history. Or more like… the inertial impact of a long history. The private, for-profit (or, to a lesser extent, not-for-profit) publisher has been the norm for a long time. There is an entire academic culture that has sprung up around the industry of textbook adoption, the purchasing and distribution of software packages keyed to textbooks, the authoring and review of textbook manuscripts, etc. I know because I’ve taken part in it over my career. Entire courses are constructed on the intellectual platform of a particular textbook. And in some domains, certain textbooks have become the “gold standard” for the teaching of X, Y or Z. There is a culture of the textbook, of the publishing package, of the premade curriculum where books for a certain subject and level can be plugged into courses crafted to correspond, not to learners’ interests or breaking news in the discipline, but to a tried-and-true preformatted intellectual trajectory in a particular subject area, at a particular level. “Intro to Bio.”, “Geometry I,” “French II,” “Spanish Conversation I,” “Advanced Grammar,” “Basics of Writing,” etc., etc., etc.

Now to say that all course planning across all of Academe fits this pattern would be an exaggeration. However, those modes tend to dominate. And it’s made all the more necessary by the “adjunctification” of higher education, where a majority of teachers at certain levels in certain disciplines are part-time teachers who also teach at multiple institutions and need to be able to show up one one campus for a particular class, open “the book” to page X and begin teaching. Textbooks and pre-formatting, with software and ancillary materials keyed to the course text make it easy and predictable for teachers — and for students. The question might be asked, though, whether or not there is something better, a way to proceed that is more aligned with critical inquiry, with learner curiosity, with faculty interests, with what’s happening in the real world. The problem is that there is a long tradition and an entrenched culture of “the textbook.”

The other problem, of course, is the entrenched power of money, of profit margin, of payment for services rendered, of contracting. By adopting the textbook, departments and faculty are buying a certain kind of quality and a certain guaranteed stability. Publishers and service providers are maintaining their livelihood. Everybody gains, right? There is a certain logic to the system, which includes a certain level of quality assurance in textbooks, software, online resources keyed to the textbook, etc. It is perfectly understandable that institutions and the people running them would prefer to maintain a system that had kept a certain staid, ordered quality to the process of producing curricular materials of a certain quality.

To jettison those guarantees, those assurances, in favor of the unknown might seem like a risky proposition. What is more, for individual faculty members, it means giving up the efficiency and comfort of using predefined, pre-verified, familiar materials and being obligated to devote a lot more time to investigating and assessing other materials in formats that may vary considerably, and will undoubtedly have a plethora of delivery options, divergent qualities, etc. In a word, it means moving from efficiency, order and familiarity to a chaotic and time-consuming option that may or may not offer high-quality materials that are well-adapted to the instructional needs of the teacher and the learning needs of students. Heck, students themselves often react badly to unfamiliar material that requires greater attention.

So the two major issues are, on the one hand, culture (or history or tradition or inertia) and, on the other, institutional pressures (or profit motive or vested interests, which might include faculty and student interest in safeguarding the familiar). From those two issues emerge a variety of difficulties. Uncertainty about quality. Increased time investment. The need to adapt and adjust both curricula and materials. Inefficiency because of unfamiliar forms or modalities. Discontent among adjuncts and tenure-track faculty because someone has upset the apple cart. In a word, there are lots of down sides.

What are the up sides? Well… one might be that liberating oneself from a “textbook” gives one greater freedom to use authentic materials directly. Faculty and students can see greater currently or timeliness in the materials and information accessed in courses. Student self-directed learning can find more space for growth when students are made responsible for pursing investigation and finding materials. In a word, intellectual freedom and critical inquiry can soar in this new space. Students can invest themselves more deeply in the process of curriculum development and knowledge creation.

OERs and authentic-document-based lessons can contribute to more active and more pertinent learning. So… I ask. What’s not to like about “Open”?

I’ve just applied to OpenCon2017. Might I suggest that you ought to consider doing the same? (Whether this year or in the future. It’s worthwhile.) . For more information, see the poster that I’m inserting below.

I realize that it has been months since I last posted to this blog. My scholarly work, my time-wasting, my disorganization and my shifted focus took me away from the Open Learning initiative that was at the origin of this blog. That does not mean that I have not been thinking about open learning or that I have any intention to abandon this blog. On the contrary.

I recognize that I am not likely to have any readers. Still, I want to think systematically about open learning and about learning in my own life and how those two distinct foci overlap or intersect. I want to document and archive my thinking as I reflect on these realms. And, eventually, I want this record of work and reflection to be available publicly to potential collaborators.

I have said this in a number of venues, but I want to record it here: Human beings are nothing if not “biological learning machines.” That is, human beings — pretty much all samples of our species, Homo sapiens sapiens — have evolved to do primarily one thing: we are learners. Our primary motivation is to seek pleasure and one of the greatest pleasures for us is to seek novelty, to figure it out, to puzzle over it, to play with it, to discern patterns and to using that thinking to improve our performance relative to that puzzle or problem, then to move to a more advanced level. In some ways, I understand perfectly well why “gamification” is so effective in educational circles. It appeals to exactly this penchant in human nature.

That said, I believe that another significant aspect of human nature is our desire to cooperate, reinforced by the “evolutionary rewards” that cooperation and social organization have wrought. (I use the term “evolutionary rewards” to designate those junctures in natural history where particular biologically/genetically programmed behaviors led to furtherance of our particular hominid species, many of which seem to be related to socialization, cooperation, transmitted information that confers survival, thriving and dominance advantages.)

The title of this particular blog has its origins in this tension: individual propensity for individual learning, which can confer an individual/competitive advantage, and the collective propensity for collaboration, cooperation and group domination (as opposed to individual competitive advantage). [Pondering — as opposed to pandering — about the relationship between individual vs. collective learning.]

I increasingly believe in the power of collective learning, which includes exchanges and development of discourse and ideas that may be uncomfortable for particular human beings, but that when put together with “the wisdom of the crowd” can be very powerful and forceful.

In short, I think that there is a biological argument in favor of collaboration and democracy.

As is my wont, I’m throwing together a bunch of semantically charged bits, following an only partially conscious, mostly intuitive process, a kind of ADHD fluttermind effect that arises in my brain. To nail down some of these flighty connections and intuitions, I will explore it further here. As much as possible, I will seek to make the gist of my “associative trail” meaningful for others. This post follows my having watched Gardner Campbell’s conversation with Jon Udell and Jeremy Dean about [Vannaver Bush’s] “As You May Think,” Annotation and Liberal Learning, along with other texts and videos on cognition, on neuroplasticity, on technology, on memory and on learning. I have not marked the various intellectual rabbit trails that I’m pulling together here, but will seek to do so, over time, probably using Hypothes.is.

Part of the way that I’m thinking about this is straightforward “old-school” analogy (which is a kind of connection across difference). Here’s the way I’m thinking: I know that brains work through a complex mechanism of dynamic networks. We still don’t know exactly how consciousness and thinking arise from large numbers of interconnected neurons stimulating each other in certain ways, but that seems to be how our brains — our mind-generators — work. It amounts to connections that are dynamically self-managed and networks that produce certain cognitive functions. Those neural networks collaborate and connect with other networks to produce increasingly complex cognitive functions, and those dynamic structures are iterated and reiterated dynamically, scaling up until they generate those effects or results or entities that we identify as “thought,” “learning” and “mind.”

Learning takes place by making new connections, by building networks of meaning, by noting and reiterating the way in which certain stimuli produce a kind of “pow!” — a cognitive effect that is satisfying, impactful, meaningful. Here, I’d like to think by analogy for a bit. Let’s suppose that, in some sense, individual human beings function as if they were single neurons. Once the input coming from another neuron is powerful enough, crossing a certain threshhold, it moves the receiver of that input to act. A human being receiving a powerful cognitive input — that “pow” that triggers a certain thrill — will then respond to the stimulus (or stimuli). A set of stimuli reaching a certain level will trigger a reponse that becomes a stimulus one or more others in a network, which can then produce cascades of neurons firing and networks blazing with activity. Those neurons (persons) and networks (social connections, collaborative relationships, institutions, groupings) light up, interacting with other neural nodes or concepts or cognitive bits and pieces. Over time, connections are forged, then strengthened or pruned, leading to a dynamic yet stable pattern of learning.

What I’m trying to suggest is that there may be ways in which learning is both individual, but also collective. There may be ways in which this whole process of associative trails builds significant patterns over time. And from those patterns emerge the dynamic yet stable results of collaborative learning. Individual learning, intuitions and associative trails count. But perhaps, they are all the more impactful when they connect to — and reinforce or modify — others. After all, if we think about scholarship, or even about intellectual culture more generally, it is about individual cognitive processing, but also about connection. It’s about communities of learning, of research, of thought. And now, with emerging open technologies and new tools that facilitate collaborative learning over time — from traditional scholarship, for example, to online learning communities and web-based annotation tools like Hypothe.is — we have have better modalities of learning, new ways of making connections and associations of deep and resonant value that shape communal thinking. Such tools help construct layers that may ultimately result in more complex, more meaningful, more impactful learning.

(I guess the question to ask is how one goes about pruning those associative trails or those connections that are not helpful or productive. How does one choose or discern? A difficult question.)

Another way to think of it is as a kind of learning ecosystem. Each part of that system can function individually, but the true beauty of the ecosystem is the way in which everything is interconnected in a kind of dynamic but generally stable system of interchange, mutual benefit, exchange, stimulus and reaction. I think of the vast mycorrhizal networks, loosely connected with tree root systems that help regulate forests, for example. (One suggestive video to watch on this topic is Susan Simard’s TED Talk on “How Trees Talk to Each Other.”) This way of thinking about it — seeing analogies and correspondences between neural networks, mycorrhizal networks, communication networks, networks of learners — resonates in significant ways with Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari’s Mille Plateaux (Paris: Éditions de Minuit, 1980) [A Thousand Plateaus, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: U of Minnesota, 1987)].

If the modality that I am talking about amounts to facilitating the growth of complex, multilayered, interconnecting and interpenetrating ecosystems of thought, of learning, of mind, my earlier difficult question can be rephrased to wonder what the analog for biochemical mechanisms that regulate or shape the overarching system might be. What complex dynamic process will “select” the strong and meaningful nodes and connections for building resiliency? What processes will target those connections that are destined to be pruned because they contribute too little to the long-term survival of the complex system?

Is there, in fact, a way in which learning, technology and connection are weaving themselves together for the construction of some greater learning/thinking entity? (Teilhard de Chardin’s noosphere?) Is this thread simply delusional? Those questions merit further thought. I’d be interested to hear other perspectives on these random musings.

I’m still pondering the relationship between openness and connection. There are significant ways in which the two concepts align well with each other in the domain of learning, even if they do not overlap semantically. That is, open learning is generally characterized by a relative ease of connection in many forms. Let me suggest some examples of potential overlaps or correspondences. Connecting new information or concepts to previous learning. Ease of connecting reflective insights to hard data, or old writing to new writing through easy access to stores of data or to the archive. Connections between learners in different regions or different time zones. Connection and collaboration over great distances. Clearly, “Open” facilitates connection.

There also exist significant ways in which one can also see tension or opposition between the two concepts. One locus of conflict lies in the disciplinary rules for knowledge development and in the parameters that teaching / learning / publishing institutions have developed for verification and control of that intellectual work. Let me offer a brief historical sketch. As humanist intellectual traditions emerged from the Renaissance and evolved through the Enlightenment, the development of ideas and the formulation and verification of mental models and bodies of knowledge took place in a relatively open process. Anyone who felt qualified and able to do so could contribute to the enterprise, which was constructed around the sharing of information, theories and arguments through print media, mostly books. Those media were “accessible” more widely than manuscripts and personal letters and notes had been. However, that “openness” was quite relative. Very few persons could afford to make the steep climb to that “free exchange of ideas.” The participants in the ostensibly open conversation were almost exclusively men. One had to be literate and one had to have the resources to buy or borrow books, assemble a personal library or be in a position to access someone else’s personal library. Additionally, one needed leisure time to read, reflect and write. Finally, one needed a modicum of social-intellectual reputation (a certain kind of social capital) to have access to publication. (Alternatively, one might gain the support and endorsement of an influential patron or a printer through more private channels, but it remains a question of sufficient social capital and intellectual/literary reputation.) Generally speaking, there was no such profession as “scholar” or “researcher.” One could, however, be an erudite writer, like Voltaire or Samuel Johnson and live by one’s pen and by one’s reputation. In the eighteenth century, writers often survived thanks to patronage, but increasingly over the course of the nineteenth century, writers were able to earn a living directly from their writing. That said, even with growing access in the nineteenth and early twentieth century to literacy, coupled with the power of publishing one’s thoughts, theories or research, only those with a certain education and a certain socio-economic standing had access to both learning and the “connected” conversation of the erudite. What is more, that conversation was largely separate from formal systems of education.

Over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, knowledge production, teaching and learning “opened” significantly. The influence of religion in education (and as a moral authority) waned somewhat. Secular education, with its somewhat greater freedom of thought and expression, gained influence through the impact and the scale of new knowledge and perspectives. The secular university also began systematically applying scholarly knowledge and theories to education. It is mostly in the nineteenth century that the scholarly conversation connected with the processes of schooling. At the same time, thinkers increasingly aligned critical inquiry and publishing with disciplinary channels. Areas of knowledge that that had previously been pursued and developed by amateurs and by men of leisure came to be formalized as new secular disciplines, like history, “modern letters,” evolutionary biology, physics.

Openness and connection continued to exist in multiple forms. Indeed, they expanded through relatively accessible channels of publication and knowledge distribution, schools and public libraries, increasingly rapid interpersonal communications. To assure the validity and reliability of information and conclusions that scholar-teachers developed within increasingly well-defined areas of knowledge, those persons (mostly men) certified and authorized each other as experts in particular knowledge domains. The same persons assumed the authority to apply disciplinary rules and criteria to the still generally open discussion of hypotheses, methods, experiments, reflections and conclusions. Over time, scholars and arbiters of publication further clarified and formalized disciplinary rules and criteria.

The authority and prestige of postsecondary institutions increased further. The production of knowledge under their aegis came to be highly regularized. Disciplines and disciplinary academic publications (journals and presses) structured , validated and assured the quality of knowledge production and knowledge dissemination. By the late twentieth century, that that pendulum had swung a bit far in the direction of verification and control (especially control). Disciplinary structure organized most learning, discouraged connection across boundaries and exerted significant influence on the relative prestige and the power of the various discipline-based sectors within universities. (And, as Sir Ken Robinson notes in this TED Talk, around 8:30, the arts fairly systematically find themselves at the bottom of the hierarchy.)

By the 1960s, discipline-focused publication had become an industry unto itself. The very profitability of that enterprise spurred the rise of aggressively for-profit enterprises (publishers, presses, disseminators), who took advantage of the publish-or-perish incentives of academia to harness both relatively inexpensive peer-review labor and large streams of unpaid-for content. Institutional dependence on peer-reviewed publication to evaluate scholars, combined with academics’ need to appear in print (to bolster their h-index or other “scholarly impact” metrics) as a proof of their “productivity” undergird that economic model. [In this phenomenon, I note, the production-oriented capitalist model reshaped the scholarly conversation within the larger evolution of political and economic culture — empire and capital –from the Enlightenment through the mid-twentieth century.

In the last two decades of the 20th century, global capitalism outstripped nation-states and the dominant globalized “knowledge industry” grew to what it is today.] To assure its intellectual production, organizations like Elsevier (“Empowering Knowledge / Knowledge Uncovered“) count on essentially free or very-low-cost academic labor and content. On the flip side of the transaction, those enterprises benefit from lucrative sales because of scholars’ need to consult new research, new writing, new scholarly articles, new books, in short, knowledge products that those firms make available for a somewhat-more-than-modest (or, in some cases, an exorbitant) price, subscription or per-use fee.

There is a paradox here. On the one hand, intellectual work and the production of knowledge are far more democratic and more widely shared in the early twenty-first century than they were in the 1750s. Additionally, modalities of communication now exist that make scholarly communication and the sharing of ideas almost universal and almost instantaneous. The internet has greatly facilitated connection and increased the potential for shared understandings among learners. There is greater openness and greater ease of communication. On the other hand, academic and scholarly controls, increasing “selectivity” and “focus”of some traditional publication channels and extremely expensive conferences tend to push knowledge production and knowledge dissemination in the direction of closure and restriction.

In a very real sense, the rise of disciplines and the enforcement of disciplinary standards in academic publishing has, in significant measure, discouraged cognitive exchange between disciplines and erected barriers to interdisciplinary communication. There are countertrends, of course, that move in the direction of openness and sharing, but the principal thrust in the evolution of scholarship (which influences the organization of learning) has been toward ostensible “rigor” in genre and style among peer-reviewed journals, a “rigor” that discounts modes of expression or formatting that do not align with disciplinary norms, and a restrictive, generally uni-disciplinary focus among journals. Additionally, the economic model that makes access to publications extremely costly also restricts functional openness and ease of connection.

Reaction to what some considered excessive copyright and DRM restrictions, along with rejection of publishing constraints and high fees, led to various openness or open access movements, initiatives, statements or trends, like the BOAI, Creative Commons and SPARC and various open science initiatives. If there is a liberation in these efforts, it is not exclusively in the form of relief from high-cost access to scholarly work, but also in the way in which open online scholarship has rekindled connection across disciplinary lines. Digital humanities, for example, often blends literary or philosophical perspectives with statistical analysis, techniques and models from information science or data visualization. The work of sociologists and literary theorists may appear together, inviting comparison and dialogue. Biologists, geologists and anthropologists may offer converging perspectives on issues like climate change in a single cluster of scholarly pieces. There are ways in which venues that are “open” through ease of access and relatively low cost, also invite “connection,” reviving some of the vigor of the scholarly conversation among erudite polymaths of the Enlightenment, for example, that had been lost.

In the end, I suspect that there will always be a tension between the mindset of some scholars (and, following them, teachers and learners) who insist on disciplinary rigor or on quasi-doctrinal views, on the one hand, and, on the other, the more open mindset, which may include a frank refusal of “restrictive disciplinarity,” of others who do not see the value of allowing their curiosity and intellectual work to be contained within a single well-defined channel or box. It is this latter thought, the refusal of historically emergent but non-essential and somewhat arbitrary constraints and the re-joining of openness and connection in digitally mediated learning and knowledge construction, that gives me hope and that stimulates my passion as a thinker and as a learner.

Plunging into the content and the spirit of the cMOOC #openlearning17, I’m thinking at length about “openness” and its many resonances. And, to be quite honest, I’m posing some hard questions during my interior conversation, as I think about the future in general, the future of education, and my own life years from now. (N.B. To some degree, there will be some overlap between this MOOC and another that I’m working on, “What Future for Education?” — taught by Clare Brooks and created by the University of London, UCL Institute of Education.) Another “life thread” that interjects itself into whatever I’m weaving here is deep distress about the Zeitgeist (triumphant extremist populism, nationalism, racism, disregard for truthfulness and ethics, factionalism).

Let me start with the last element (concern), then move on from there. For obvious reasons, I’m worried. My country is entering into what promises to be a phase of extreme conflict, dissension, instability, strife and extreme disregard on the part of many political leaders (and their followers) for fellow human beings. While I’m concerned for the well-being of the vulnerable and marginalized in the U.S., while I’m taken aback by gag orders and by blatant lying, and while I despise the way in which leaders in power seem to want to jettison environmental protections, reject climate-change treaties and ignore scientific evidence and muzzle conscientious scientists and public servants, I’m also very selfishly wondering about my own prosperity, my life savings and my retirement portfolio. Will I be able to retire early? Will I be able to retire at all? Or will the economy melt down and diminish my retirement savings and force me to continue working for many more years to come? More importantly, will this horror lead to armed conflict or destruction of the social ecosystem that I know how to navigate?

In this context (one that I recognize is far harsher for folks in other countries or regions), I find it a bit harder to commit to “openness” in the sense of devoting time and talent to the creation of resources for unfettered distribution, with little or no proprietary control or benefit. My fear and anxiety make it harder for me to feel generous. The dire threat of this social-political moment makes me wonder if I need to hold back and preserve the resources of my work and talent, to invest them in my own future good. Should I not seek maximum benefit, eventually, by selling my creations for top dollar? Of course, it is possible that I’m deluding myself about the value of my cognitive powers and my efforts in knowledge-creation, learning management, or the crafting of educational products. Still, I suspect that I may have a few good ideas, strategies and frameworks to offer. I may be able to help improve the quality of learning, both now and for the future.

So, influenced by angst and concern for the social, economic and political future of my country and the world, I ask myself whether or not I should try to shape these potential contributions to a more commercial and self-serving purpose. Should I craft appealing products, market them, sell the heck out of them? (And to heck with openness!) Except that, in the end, that’s not really who I am. Despite it all, I am determined to continue to create high-quality frameworks, concepts and materials in collaboration and in dialogue with colleagues and fellow-travelers. In some cases, I may make my stuff broadly available as OERs. Still, with my sympathetic nervous system constantly stimulated by what I see and hear daily, it’s hard to remain dilated, relaxed, generous, vulnerable and open — in the best senses of that last word — connecting freely and meshing with a process that draws me out of my self-centeredness. (Hmmm… I can’t help but wonder: Is “openness” functionally opposed to “self-centeredness”?)

This blog’s initial reasons for existing are contingent and instrumental. Its purpose will evolve over time, undoubtedly, but for the moment, it is primarily intended as a tool for participating in the Open Learning 17 cMOOC.

Currently on sabbatical, I have spent a great deal of time thinking about teaching, learning, education. I am hopeful that these reflections will help me better support my students’ learning and allow me to empower and equip them — and myself — for living and working in the twenty-first century. Despite cultural and political forces to the contrary, I am hopeful than openness — open exchange, open access, clarity about power relationships, verifiable accuracy in the public record, freedom of connection, freedom of speech, open-mindedness — will provide humanity with the tools it needs to better understand our universe, to help us build more effective, more helpful, more constructive and more sustainable societies across the planet that allow all human beings, indeed, the biosphere as a whole, to survive in diversity and to thrive.

Open learning, connected learning, collaborative learning, critical learning are all part of what I hope will be an emergent paradigm that points toward increasingly collaborative, satisfying, peaceful and sustainable human cultures. It is not an exaggeration to say that I believe that the long-term survival of Homo sapiens sapiens and of all sentient species depends on a radical shift that must include changes in dominant notions of education and learning.